The Prometheus Deception (29 page)

Now the BMW's throttle was fully open; the engine straining, giving off a blatting noise. They were virtually flying along the side of the A-1, against traffic.

But they were still not in the clear, for rushing toward them was a single headlight of a motorcycle, speeding even faster than the other vehicles on the road, and Bryson knew it had to be another pursuer dispatched from the Château de Saint-Meurice.

There was a squealing of brakes, car horns honking, and suddenly the other motorcycle, too, had reversed direction and was just behind them. In the rearview, Bryson could see it gaining on them; though he could not see the make of the cycle, the engine roar told him that it was even more powerful than the BMW he had rented in Paris, capable of attaining even greater speeds.

Suddenly Bryson felt something slam into them. It was the other motorcycle, deliberately crashing into the rear wheel, almost knocking them over! Above the motorcycle's roar he could hear, very near his ear, Layla screaming in terror.

“Are you all right?” he shouted.

“Yes!” she screamed in reply. “But
move
it!”

He tried to put on another burst of speed, but the motorcycle was already traveling at its maximum.

Another impact sent the motorcycle veering off the side of the road. Just off the shoulder was a long flat meadow, cleared farmland interspersed with wooden boxes used to collect hay or other crops. Bryson righted the vehicle, then accelerated off the asphalt and onto the grass and dirt, the pursuing motorcycle right behind. No gunshots, which told him that the driver needed to use both hands for maneuvering and could not spare a hand to use a weapon.

Pursue your pursuer
.

This had been one of Ted Waller's oft-repeated aperçus.

In the end
, you
will decide who is predator and who is prey. The prey survives only by becoming the predator
.

Bryson now did the unexpected, circling around the meadow, carving deep ruts in the soft earth, until he was charging straight at the other motorcycle.

The other motorcyclist, obviously taken aback by this change in strategy, tried to spin out of the way, but there was no time. Bryson crashed into him, and the driver was flung from his vehicle.

Slamming on his brakes, the cycle spewing dirt into the air, he came to a stop. Layla leaped off, then he did, flinging the bike to the ground.

The other driver was running away, and as he ran he was obviously reaching for a weapon, but Layla already had hers out, and she fired the Beretta three times in rapid succession.

With a scream, the pursuer tumbled to the ground, but he had managed to wrest his weapon from its holster, and he fired back. His aim was off; bullets spit into the ground near them. Layla fired again, then Bryson had his gun out and fired, hitting their enemy in the chest.

He flew backward, sprawled on the ground, dead.

Bryson raced toward him, flipping the prone body over, rummaging through the man's pockets for identification.

He pulled out a wallet. He was not surprised to find one; the pursuer had been given no notice, and thus no time to rid himself of identifying documents.

What he saw, however, he was not prepared for. It was beyond a surprise; the shock was deep, stunning, taking his breath away.

The detritus of bureaucracy, in this case, was straightforward. Documents could be forged, but Bryson was an expert at recognizing fake documents, and this was not one of them. There was no doubt. He examined it carefully in the bright moonlight, turning it over, locating the requisite fibers and irreproducible markings.

“What is it?” Layla asked. He handed it to her; she saw at once.

“Oh, my
God!
” she said, her voice hushed.

Their pursuer had been no mere rent-a-cop, nor even a French citizen on Arnaud's security payroll.

He was a U.S. citizen, employed at the Paris station of the CIA.

ELEVEN

The secretary had been with the Central Intelligence Agency for seventeen years, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone had tried to bypass her and barge into the office of her boss, Harry Dunne. Even on the few occasions when the Director of Central Intelligence dropped by his deputy's office unannounced (Harry almost always went to the director's office), and the matter was urgent, the director had at least waited for her to buzz Harry.

Yet this man had ignored her entreaties, her protestations and warnings, her firm insistence that Mr. Dunne was out of town, and had just done the unthinkable. He had stormed past her and had gone right into her boss's office. Marjorie knew the mandated security procedures; she pressed the emergency button mounted underneath her main desk drawer, thereby summoning Security, and only then had she frantically warned Harry Dunne over the intercom that, despite her best efforts, this lunatic was coming through.

*   *   *

Bryson knew there were only two choices now: retreat or confrontation, and he preferred confrontation, the only option that had a chance of eliciting spontaneous revelation, forcing unplanned truths. Layla had urged him to stay away from the Agency, counseling that survival was more important now than whatever information he could obtain. But to Bryson there was really no choice at all: to penetrate the lies, to finally learn the truth about Elena, about his entire life, he had to face Dunne.

Layla remained in France, trying to work her contacts, to learn what she could about Jacques Arnaud and his recent activities. He had not told her anything about the Directorate; it was still best to keep her in the dark. She said good-bye to him at Charles de Gaulle Airport, surprising Bryson with the ardency of her hug, her kiss that was more than the farewell kiss of a friend, immediately after which she turned away in flushed embarrassment.

Harry Dunne was standing at his plate-glass window, jacket off, smoking a cigarette on a very long ivory holder. Smoking in the headquarters building was, Bryson knew, against Agency regulations, but as deputy director, Dunne was unlikely to be called on it by anyone. He turned as Bryson entered, Marjorie right behind him.

“Mr. Dunne, I'm so
sorry
, I tried to
stop
this man!” Marjorie called frantically. “Security's on the way.”

For an instant Dunne seemed to be examining him, his narrow, creased face compressed into a frown, the small bloodshot eyes glittering. Bryson had taken care to disguise himself, alter his appearance just enough to confound any video face-matching equipment. Then Dunne shook his head as he exhaled a plume of smoke with a loud, hacking cough. “Naw, it's all right, Margie, call off Security. I can deal with this fella myself.”

Bewildered, the secretary looked from her boss to the intruder, then, straightening, she backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

The white-haired Dunne took a step toward Bryson, visibly enraged. “All Security would do would be to restrain me from killing you with my bare hands,” he snapped, “and I'm not sure I want that. What kind of game are you playing here, Bryson? You think we're fools, is that it? You think we don't get constant field reports, satellite feeds? I guess it's true what they say: once a traitor, always a traitor.” Dunne snubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing glass ashtray on the edge of his desk. “I have no idea how the hell you got into the building, with all our vaunted security procedures. But I expect the surveillance video will tell the tale.”

Bryson was jolted by the man's unbanked fury, and it caused him to hesitate. Fury was the last thing he expected on the part of Harry Dunne. Fear, defensiveness, bluster—but not anger. Through gritted teeth, Bryson said, “You sent out your henchmen to kill me. Low-level Paris-station flunkies.”

Dunne snorted with derision as he pulled another cigarette from the jacket pocket of his rumpled gray suit. He inserted it in the ivory holder and lighted it, waving out the match and dropping it into the ashtray. “You can do better than that, Professor,” Dunne said, shaking his head as he turned back to the picture window that looked over the verdant Virginia countryside. “Look, the facts are simple. We sent you out to worm your way back into the Directorate. Instead, all you seem to have done is blow up some of our most promising links to the Directorate. Then you disappeared, went to ground. Sort of like a mob hit man blowing away witnesses.” He turned back to Bryson, exhaled a cloud of smoke into his face. “We thought you were
ex
-Directorate. I guess that's where we made our biggest mistake, huh?”

“What the hell are you trying to say to me?”

“I'd like to ask you to take a polygraph, but that's one of the first things they teach you boys, isn't it—how to beat the box?”

Disgusted, Bryson slapped a stiff blue plastic-laminate card onto the only bare spot of mahogany visible on Harry Dunne's desk. The Agency ID card he had pulled from the wallet of the dead motorcyclist outside of Paris, the pursuer dispatched from Jacques Arnaud's château. “You want to know how I got in here?”

Dunne picked it up, immediately examined the hologram: holding it up to the light, tipping it to bring out the three-dimensional CIA seal, finding the magnetic foil sandwiched between the plastic layers. It was an everyday object at the CIA, but only at the CIA—a high-tech, high-security identification card, virtually impossible to fake. Dunne slid it into a desktop card reader. On his large blue computer screen, a face popped up, along with an employee's basic personnel information. The face wasn't Bryson's, but at the moment, Bryson's altered and disguised face fairly closely resembled the one up on the monitor.

“Paris station. Where the
hell
did you get this?” Dunne demanded.

“You going to listen to me now?”

Dunne's face was wary. He exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nostrils as he sank into his desk chair. He snubbed out the cigarette, prematurely. “At least let me call Finneran in here.”

“Finneran?”

“You met him at Blue Ridge. My aide-de-camp.”

“Forget it.”

“He's my goddamned institutional memory—”

“Forget it! Just you and me and the listening devices.”

Dunne shrugged. He pulled out another cigarette, but instead of placing it into the holder, he began toying with it between nicotine-stained fingers. Through the threadbare fabric of Dunne's blue button-down shirt, Bryson could see the outlines of an array of nicotine patches along his shoulders and biceps.

As Bryson recounted the events of the past few days, Dunne became grave. When he finally spoke, his voice was hushed. “A two-million-dollar bounty on your head, placed even
before
you showed up on Calacanis's ship. Somehow the word was out on the street that you were back in the game.”

“You seem to forget they tried to dispatch me in Washington. They seemed to know I'd be coming back, looking for the old Directorate headquarters. That points to a leak in the pipes right here, in this building.” Bryson inscribed a small circle in the air with an index finger.

“Christ!” shot back the deputy director, tearing the cigarette in half and flinging the pieces toward the ashtray. “The whole goddamned thing was off the books, the only record of your involvement your name in the Security data bank for purposes of clearing you in and out of the building.”

“If the Directorate is wired into CIA, that's enough to do it.”

“Come
on,
man, it wasn't even a true name! You were Jonas Barrett—a cover alias used in the Security logs being, incidentally, against every fucking rule in the playbook. You don't lie to Security. Never lie to Mother.”

“Expense vouchers, equipment requisitions—”

“Buried, all messaging text in proprietary cipher, all need-to-know, all DDCI priority. Look, Bryson, I covered my ass, what the hell you think? You were a huge goddamned risk on my part, I gotta tell ya. I don't know what stress they put you under, how they might have burned you out. Put a guy's red-bordered folder under a fucking microscope, you still don't know shit about what's in his head. I mean, look, they put you out to pasture in your little cow-town college—”

“For God's sake,”
thundered Bryson, “do you think I
volunteered
for this? Your goons came and wrenched me out of retirement. I was just beginning to heal, and you came to tear open the scab! I'm not here to defend myself—I assume you boys did your homework on me. I want to know what the hell CIA was doing, following me outside Paris in order to kill me. I hope to hell you have a good explanation, or at least a convincing lie.”

Dunne glowered. “I'm going to ignore that last dig, Bryson,” he said quietly. “Think this through, wouldya? According to what you're telling me, you were recognized by this Directorate operative you worked with in Kowloon, Vance Gifford—”

“Yes, and according to the Sangiovanni brothers, I was also identified by Arnaud's man aboard the ship. That's obvious and beyond dispute. It's not hard to walk back the cat and see how Santiago de Compostela happened. I'm talking about Chantilly, about Paris! About one CIA operative I happened to flush out because he was sloppy enough to leave his ID papers on his person. And where there's one, there's always more, you know that as well as I. So what are you going to tell me—that the Agency is out of control? It's either that or you're double-dealing me, and I want to know which it is,
now!
”

“No!”
Dunne shouted hoarsely, his voice then dissolving in a series of hacking coughs. “Those aren't the only possible explanations!”

“Then what are you trying to sell me?”

Dunne drew his own circle in the air with an index finger, mimicking Bryson's, signaling the room bugs. He scowled. “I'm saying I want to check some things out. I'm saying I think we ought to continue this discussion at another time and place.” His face seemed even more lined, the hollows deeper, and for the first time his eyes looked haunted.